Ubuntu 26.10 beta: coreutils Rust switch complete, zero GNU exceptions

coreutils with zero GNU exceptions

Ubuntu Foundations says coreutils has transitioned 100% to uutils. uutils is a project that reimplements GNU coreutils in Rust, and 26.10 ships rust-coreutils 0.12.0.

According to the Server docs, the commands still provided by GNU were chmod, chown, cp, df, mv, rm and true in 25.10, and cp, df, mv, rm and true in 26.04 LTS. In 26.10 that list is empty.

Provider packages of the form coreutils-from-<provider> decide which implementation supplies the standard commands. What changed is the default utility set, not the whole OS.

Caveats: the apt operation for switching back to GNU

GNU coreutils remains available, but switching providers needs an apt option that allows removing essential packages. The docs say update-alternatives is not suitable for this switch.

The documented command for installing the GNU provider is as follows.

sudo apt install coreutils-from-gnu coreutils-from-uutils- --allow-remove-essential

build-essential depends on coreutils-from-uutils, so packages that depend on it may conflict with coreutils-from-gnu. That is why it pays to check what apt wants to remove before switching back.

Where to compare in automation

If existing scripts rely on the output or error messages of commands such as cp, mv and rm, the parts that ran on GNU in 25.10 or 26.04 LTS run on the Rust implementation for the first time in 26.10. Comparing both releases side by side on the same input shows the differences.

Switching back to GNU is an option, but it is tied to build tool dependencies, so comparing results first keeps the scope smaller.

In Ubuntu 26.10, Rust coreutils with no GNU exceptions becomes the default, and the way back to GNU is an apt operation that handles essential packages and the build-essential dependency together.